All prisons are penetrable

The second crew of ‘Free Gaza’ activists left the Gaza Strip yesterday
on board SS Dignity, and have just arrived safely back in Cyprus. Like
the first two ‘Free Gaza’ boats which sailed to Gaza back in August, SS
Dignity also managed to break the Israeli siege, and it docked in Gaza
Port on 29 October. The SS Dignity crew didn’t stay very long - just
three days in all - but another ferry is expected to set sail from
Cyprus next week. If it too manages to break the siege and land in
Gaza, the Free Gaza Movement hopes it can establish a monthly ferry
service from Cyprus to Gaza.

The international media has devoured the story of Palestinian and
international human rights activists, doctors, academics,
parliamentarians and lawyers sailing through Israeli gunboat-infested
waters to reach the besieged Gaza Strip. But inside Gaza, the reaction
has been decidedly mixed. Some of my friends support the Free Gaza
movement, but others tell me they think the crew are nothing more than
tourists who sail here for their own adventure. The fact that the crew
stayed in a fancy hotel for the three days they were in Gaza didn’t
really help public relations - the majority of Gazans couldn’t afford
dinner at the Marna House Hotel, never mind the luxury of a room there.

But a handful of the SS Dignity crew opted not to leave when the ferry
set sail yesterday, and instead they’ve stayed behind, to work
alongside local Gazans who are campaigning to end this brutal siege.
They’ve joined the six internationals who chose to stay on in Gaza in
August, rather than leaving when the first two boats set sail back to
Cyprus.

The ‘gang of six’ has spent the last three months accompanying local
fishing boats which are violently harassed by the Israeli military when
they fish in their own waters just a few miles out to sea, and they’ve
also been helping with the Gaza olive harvest. Many local farmers have
land around the border areas of northern and eastern Gaza, and are
frightened to access their own land because of repeated shooting from
the Israeli military, who have established a unilateral ‘buffer zone’
across the Gaza Strip. Local farmers have been delighted that a small
crowd of internationals are prepared to stand by them while they
harvest their olives, and they say they want more internationals to
come to Gaza and witness the effects of the siege for themselves.

The Free Gaza movement has flaws, including its obsession with
attracting celebrities to join the forthcoming crews to Gaza. The crews
need to be more media savvy, because the mainstream media are lazy
buggers - they’re happy to focus on the foreigners who sail to Gaza, as
opposed to the dirty complex politics of the siege itself. But these
vessels have done something wonderful - they’ve proved that the siege
of Gaza can be broken. The international community has shamefully
forgotten Gaza, and left 1.7 million people to rot in silence. But - if
people are willing to take the risk - then freedom in Gaza has a
chance. History shows us that bars will break, and all prisons are
penetrable.

Related articles

Popular tags

The Gaza Blog

The Gaza blog is a weekly dispatch from the Gaza Strip. Louisa Waugh lives and works in Gaza, and her blogs capture the complexities and challenges of daily life under siege, amidst the aftermath of Israel’s devastating recent offensive.

New Internationalist reports on issues of world poverty and inequality. We focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide in the fight for global justice. More about our work